Principled Profit: The Good Business Blog

Musings on the world-wide movement for ethical business, frugal marketing, and how honesty, integrity, and quality combine with deep relationship building to create business success. By the originator of the Ethical Business Pledge campaign and award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books

This blog has moved to:
http://greenandprofitable.com/blog

Get this widget!
Visit the Widget Gallery

If you'd like to get an update when we post new content, please click here to subscribe via RSS or to subscribe by e-mail.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

75% of Executives Have Experienced Fraud!?!

Sometimes it seems those of us who care about ethics are fighting a losing battle. My colleague, Chris Bauer, reports on some shocking findings in a survey conducted by the well-known accounting firm KPMG:
  • Of 459 executives at US companies with revenues above $250 million, 75% had experienced fraud
  • The fraud had cost 36% of the companies surveyed at least $1 million
  • For those companies experiencing fraud in the area of financial reporting, the average cost was $257,923,000 (other types of fraud had less dollar impact)
I believe the only way we can turn this around is to show businesses that ethical behavior is ultimately profitable--that's the position I advocated in my book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, and I continue to advocate that position in the Ethics Pledge campaign and elsewhere. The costs of the fraud itself, the hit the company takes when it's discovered, the environmental, workplace harassment, and other lawsuits that tend to crop up against fraudulent companies, etc. etc. make this a very obvious conclusion. But apparently the business world can't see it.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home